Artistic Expression

Stage, screen, and studio performances of marquee entertainers like Nina Simone gave the civil rights movement a different set of tools to use, according to Ruth Feldstein, an associate professor in the Department of History and the Graduate Program in American Studies at Rutgers University–Newark and author of How It Feels to Be Free: Black Women Entertainers and the Civil Rights Movement.

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Finding a fresh perspective on the civil rights era requires a certain amount of ingenuity—and a few good women. Ruth Feldstein, associate professor in the Department of History and the Graduate Program in American Studies at Rutgers University–Newark, has a lock on both, with the publication of her latest book about six African-American female performers and the battles they waged 50 years ago on two fronts—for civil rights and for women’s rights.

Arriving during the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, How It Feels to Be Free: Black Women Entertainers and the Civil Rights Movement (Oxford University Press, 2013) celebrates the activism of these performers in broadening our view of social revolutions. It was not only marches on Washington, D.C., and “Dream” speeches and male voices that propelled the civil rights movement through American society. It was also the stage, screen, and studio performances of marquee entertainers like Lena Horne, Cicely Tyson, Diahann Carroll, Abbey Lincoln, Miriam Makeba, and Nina Simone who gave the movement a different set of tools to use through their art.

On the eve of beginning her research for the book, Feldstein began to better appreciate the complex roles of black female artists who “perform civil rights” when she first listened very closely to the anger behind Simone’s iconic protest song, “Mississippi Goddam.”

“For the women I write about,” says Feldstein, “it wasn’t a question of, ‘Is my commitment to race or to gender?’ Their vision of freedom included a certain version of power for women as well as racial liberation. I see them engaging both gender and race simultaneously.

“With her incendiary lyrics and performance style, Simone challenged the entrenched idea that black women had to behave a certain way in order to be treated fairly by whites. Simone was saying, ‘No, I don’t need to adhere to a certain code of femininity in order to make claims for freedom.’ She was performing female power and making that essential to her bid for black freedom.”

Feldstein found that researching the book was often, as she puts it, “heartbreaking.” The lives of these women were not easy or straightforward, and their trailblazing activism cost them. When an influential critic called singer Abbey Lincoln a “professional Negro,” she wasn’t approached to record another album for 10 years. After the movie Sounder was released in 1972, a drama about an African-American family living in the rural Louisiana of the 1930s, actress Cicely Tyson had to endure letters like the one from a white woman who didn’t realize “that kind of love was possible” between a black man and a black woman. And following the bombing of a Birmingham Baptist church in 1963 and the murder of Medgar Evers, the African-American civil rights activist, Horne felt she could no longer just “sing the same old songs,” she said.

In the end, according to Feldstein, the politics of emancipation and entertainment reinforced each other as both movements progressed. “Was this good for these women or bad for these women? The story doesn’t break down in simple ways. This is not a simple success story about how great they were and how they broke barriers,” says Feldstein. “It’s also a story about costs and the unfinished work in both movements.”